Abstract

Like many crude, but compelling ideas,
the term 'ethnic pentagon' has its
genesis in America, not, as one might
expect, as a marketing device by multinationals,
but as an originally obscure
directive from the Office of
Management and Budget, prosaically
entitled, 'Directive 15: Race and Ethnic
Standards for Federal Statistics and
Administrative Reporting, May 1977.'
For more than two decades this
directive set the visible bureaucraticracial
categories in the USA: 'White' and
'Black' (of course), Hispanic, Native
American/Native Alaskan, and, my
personal favourite, Asian/Pacific
Islanders (a category that probably
includes at least half of the world's
population). Of course, various people
complained about this categorization
almost before the ink was dry on this
document, and various learned bodies
attacked it for its tendency to reify social
categories as natural ones (the American
Anthropological Association has a
cogent, if intellectually unexciting,
critique of it on its website), but as big
funders fell into line, more and more
scholarly projects reproduced this
categorization, it became more and
more difficult to do nearly anything in
the absence of dealing with these
divisions.